Re: Why SRS really sucks

>Stuart D. Gathman writes:
> >             I was able to stop problems with idiots rejecting
> > '+' in localpart by switching to SES.
>
>I've had several confirmed cases of mail being rejected because the
>mail-from had '=', but as best I know, I've had no problems from '+'
>so far.
>
>There's even a commercial anti-spam package for Windows servers that
>has an option to refuse mail with '='.

I concur with Dick on that.  I haven't had any problems with "+", 
just "=".  My response is usually to educate the sysadmins on RFC 
2821 section 4.1.2 which defines the local-part as being a dot-string 
('atoms' connected by "."), and RFC 2822 section 3.2.4 which defines 
"atom" as being a string of "atext" elements, and "atext" being any 
of ALPHA / DIGIT / "!" / "#" / "$" / "%" / "&" / "'" / "*" / "+" / 
"-" / "/" / "=" / "?" / "^" / "_" / "`" / "{" / "|" / "}" / "~".

So, clearly both "=" and "+" are legal address characters in the 
local-part, per RFC.

Only once has this education failed to remove the offending policy 
from the receiving MTA.  In that case, the admins removed it for that 
specific user, which apparently also increased the spam they 
received.  I imagine this is because they disabled a whole anti-spam 
package for that mailbox in order to accomplish this.

Why they can't just remove the "=" from the ruleset system-wide, I 
can't fathom.  They must be rejecting mail from every SRS signer on 
the planet, and anyone who quite legitimately uses "=" in their mailbox name.


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Tom Lahti
Tx3 Online Services

(888)4-TX3-SVC (489-3782)
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